This post was written in response to the Storyworth prompt I received this week.
“What weaknesses do you struggle with the most?”
As I read the title for the story I am to write this week, my first thoughts were that I did not want to tackle this subject. It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t have or hadn’t had weaknesses but I couldn’t see the value of listing issues that I perhaps have not yet overcome but should have by the seventh decade of life in which I am now living. The title seemed to be asking me to reveal weaknesses that still plague me or things with which I still struggle. I started asking myself to define the words “weaknesses” and “struggles” in order to discern if a list of each would be the same or significantly different. I have decided that these words are not synonyms. Since I want my stories to be informative, honest and inspirational, I have changed the wording of the title to provide me with an opportunity to share some meaningful personal discoveries that have brought spiritual health for me. You will now see an edited title for this new story.
“WHAT PERSONAL STRUGGLES HAVE YOU BEEN FACED WITH DURING YOUR LIFETIME?”
I suppose to address this issue I will start by owning the fact that I struggled in childhood and into my early teens with an unwillingness to accept the physical way God created me. I would say I had self image issues. If I heard the word “big” once, I heard it about a million times!!! It started at birth apparently when my mother was three weeks overdue with me. I weighed 10 lbs 3 1/2 oz’s and was 23” long - supposedly the longest girl baby that had been born in the Gunderson Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, WI up until that time. And then, when my mother saw me for the first time, she said my blanket was wrapped around me in such a way that one hand poked out under my chin in a way that exaggerated its size so my mother thought there was something wrong with me. From that start I continued to grow faster it seems than other girls and boys my age so I was always the tallest in my class and sometimes the tallest in my school even though not the oldest. And whenever someone would comment on my size, they would exclaim about how “big” I was not how “tall” I was. My father made me shake hands with other farmers so they could experience my size and grip. Of course those men were exuberantly shocked. I could not be fitted at the Woolworths Five and Dime for a birthstone ring like my sisters were able to be because there weren’t any rings large enough for my finger though my mother took me to several different stores hoping to find a ring that fit but with no success. And then there was my growing foot size. I wore size 9 shoes in the fourth grade so when I needed a larger size than that, there were no girl options. Girl shoes only went to size 9 1/2.
And to make matters worse, our family was quite poor. Families in our church brought bags of their children’s outgrown clothes for our family with five children. I was always excited about those bags of clothes but most often the dresses that fit me weren’t really dresses I liked. There were many times into my college years that I kept my coat on in places I went so that people wouldn’t see what I was wearing. I also sometimes sat on my hands to hide them from people who might notice how large my hands were.
One of the ways God chose to change my attitude toward how He had made me would begin with a wonderful friend I met as I started high school and left Cross Ridge School, my one room country elementary school. My freshman class was coming from several different elementary schools. The newly consolidated Cochrane-Fountain City High School hosted a welcome event for our class as all of us completed eighth grade. We met in the gymnasium of the new C-FC High School. Most of us were from elementary schools that did not have a gymnasium so we were all excited about this huge venue with basketball hoops and a volleyball net. I had never played either of these games but I was athletic and loved sports. At this event there was another girl as tall and as athletic as I was. She was also the second born child in a family of five siblings and each of us lived on a dairy farm. Both of us were excited to meet each other. Karen Brandhorst and I became best friends and cheered each other on all through high school. Though we have not lived near each other as adults, our friendship remains and the pride we found in our stature as high school freshman remains with us today.
My disappointment with God as He created me changed completely during my early years of college. What God used then was an introduction during Freshman Week at UW-Madison to a 6‘3” tall, dark and handsome junior named John Worden. It would take him most of my freshman year to realize how wonderful it would be to get to know me but with a little help from a good friend of his, he finally decided to see if I was free one evening for an event at the Ratskellar of UW-Madison. Two years later we were engaged. He even thought my hands were beautiful! This August 20, 2021 will be our 55th wedding anniversary. I am so thankful for this godly, faithful man who loved me and with whom the Lord has blessed us with three children and eight grandchildren. I no longer struggle with the way God created me. I believe the words of the Psalm I quote below.
Psalm 139: 13-18
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
I share one other struggle that has been present most noticeably in my adult years. I struggle with intimidation. I don’t know why this is but when I am in a new and unfamiliar situation, I tend to be a listener rather than an eager participant. Even if I have opinions about what is being said, I hesitate to express my opinion. It seems I fear that I won’t know what to say if I am challenged in my statements so I tend to delay any response and end up feeling as though I’ve missed an opportunity to weigh in on a meaningful subject that may have needed or warranted my view of a matter. It seems I view my ideas and thoughts as inferior to those of others and therefore unwelcome. I seem to think that I am not as articulate or smart as others so I allow myself to be intimidated and silenced when I should have greater courage.
A number of years ago, I was reading the Biblical book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah had returned to Jerusalem from exile in Persia. He was rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem but had significant resistance from two men who were governing in Samaria and the area surrounding Jerusalem. These men were scheming to harm him and sent him numerous messages which contained lies in hopes of getting Nehemiah to leave the city or take refuge in the Temple and stop rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah recognized that he was not being told the truth. He realized that God had not sent those who were claiming to warn him of danger. Nehemiah correctly realizes and states that "Tobiah and Sanballat had hired others to intimidate me so that I would commit a sin by doing this, and then they would give me a bad name to discredit me.” Nehemiah prayed to God, “Remember Tobiah and Sanballat because of what they have done; remember also…the rest of the prophets who have been trying to intimidate me.” Nehemiah was able to resist the intimidation and the wall was completed. “When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God."
As I read the title for the story I am to write this week, my first thoughts were that I did not want to tackle this subject. It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t have or hadn’t had weaknesses but I couldn’t see the value of listing issues that I perhaps have not yet overcome but should have by the seventh decade of life in which I am now living. The title seemed to be asking me to reveal weaknesses that still plague me or things with which I still struggle. I started asking myself to define the words “weaknesses” and “struggles” in order to discern if a list of each would be the same or significantly different. I have decided that these words are not synonyms. Since I want my stories to be informative, honest and inspirational, I have changed the wording of the title to provide me with an opportunity to share some meaningful personal discoveries that have brought spiritual health for me. You will now see an edited title for this new story.
“WHAT PERSONAL STRUGGLES HAVE YOU BEEN FACED WITH DURING YOUR LIFETIME?”
I suppose to address this issue I will start by owning the fact that I struggled in childhood and into my early teens with an unwillingness to accept the physical way God created me. I would say I had self image issues. If I heard the word “big” once, I heard it about a million times!!! It started at birth apparently when my mother was three weeks overdue with me. I weighed 10 lbs 3 1/2 oz’s and was 23” long - supposedly the longest girl baby that had been born in the Gunderson Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, WI up until that time. And then, when my mother saw me for the first time, she said my blanket was wrapped around me in such a way that one hand poked out under my chin in a way that exaggerated its size so my mother thought there was something wrong with me. From that start I continued to grow faster it seems than other girls and boys my age so I was always the tallest in my class and sometimes the tallest in my school even though not the oldest. And whenever someone would comment on my size, they would exclaim about how “big” I was not how “tall” I was. My father made me shake hands with other farmers so they could experience my size and grip. Of course those men were exuberantly shocked. I could not be fitted at the Woolworths Five and Dime for a birthstone ring like my sisters were able to be because there weren’t any rings large enough for my finger though my mother took me to several different stores hoping to find a ring that fit but with no success. And then there was my growing foot size. I wore size 9 shoes in the fourth grade so when I needed a larger size than that, there were no girl options. Girl shoes only went to size 9 1/2.
And to make matters worse, our family was quite poor. Families in our church brought bags of their children’s outgrown clothes for our family with five children. I was always excited about those bags of clothes but most often the dresses that fit me weren’t really dresses I liked. There were many times into my college years that I kept my coat on in places I went so that people wouldn’t see what I was wearing. I also sometimes sat on my hands to hide them from people who might notice how large my hands were.
One of the ways God chose to change my attitude toward how He had made me would begin with a wonderful friend I met as I started high school and left Cross Ridge School, my one room country elementary school. My freshman class was coming from several different elementary schools. The newly consolidated Cochrane-Fountain City High School hosted a welcome event for our class as all of us completed eighth grade. We met in the gymnasium of the new C-FC High School. Most of us were from elementary schools that did not have a gymnasium so we were all excited about this huge venue with basketball hoops and a volleyball net. I had never played either of these games but I was athletic and loved sports. At this event there was another girl as tall and as athletic as I was. She was also the second born child in a family of five siblings and each of us lived on a dairy farm. Both of us were excited to meet each other. Karen Brandhorst and I became best friends and cheered each other on all through high school. Though we have not lived near each other as adults, our friendship remains and the pride we found in our stature as high school freshman remains with us today.
My disappointment with God as He created me changed completely during my early years of college. What God used then was an introduction during Freshman Week at UW-Madison to a 6‘3” tall, dark and handsome junior named John Worden. It would take him most of my freshman year to realize how wonderful it would be to get to know me but with a little help from a good friend of his, he finally decided to see if I was free one evening for an event at the Ratskellar of UW-Madison. Two years later we were engaged. He even thought my hands were beautiful! This August 20, 2021 will be our 55th wedding anniversary. I am so thankful for this godly, faithful man who loved me and with whom the Lord has blessed us with three children and eight grandchildren. I no longer struggle with the way God created me. I believe the words of the Psalm I quote below.
Psalm 139: 13-18
13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
17 How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them!
18 Were I to count them,
they would outnumber the grains of sand—
when I awake, I am still with you.
I share one other struggle that has been present most noticeably in my adult years. I struggle with intimidation. I don’t know why this is but when I am in a new and unfamiliar situation, I tend to be a listener rather than an eager participant. Even if I have opinions about what is being said, I hesitate to express my opinion. It seems I fear that I won’t know what to say if I am challenged in my statements so I tend to delay any response and end up feeling as though I’ve missed an opportunity to weigh in on a meaningful subject that may have needed or warranted my view of a matter. It seems I view my ideas and thoughts as inferior to those of others and therefore unwelcome. I seem to think that I am not as articulate or smart as others so I allow myself to be intimidated and silenced when I should have greater courage.
A number of years ago, I was reading the Biblical book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah had returned to Jerusalem from exile in Persia. He was rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem but had significant resistance from two men who were governing in Samaria and the area surrounding Jerusalem. These men were scheming to harm him and sent him numerous messages which contained lies in hopes of getting Nehemiah to leave the city or take refuge in the Temple and stop rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. Nehemiah recognized that he was not being told the truth. He realized that God had not sent those who were claiming to warn him of danger. Nehemiah correctly realizes and states that "Tobiah and Sanballat had hired others to intimidate me so that I would commit a sin by doing this, and then they would give me a bad name to discredit me.” Nehemiah prayed to God, “Remember Tobiah and Sanballat because of what they have done; remember also…the rest of the prophets who have been trying to intimidate me.” Nehemiah was able to resist the intimidation and the wall was completed. “When all our enemies heard about this, all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God."
Reading
about this issue of intimidation in the Bible revealed to me that when
intimidation causes people to be silenced and derailed from following
God's leading, it is a sin. This scripture has been a great
encouragement to me to recognize intimidation as sin and become more
like Nehemiah who refused to be intimidated by those who sought to
silence God's messenger.
Though
I sometimes still struggle to overcome intimidation in all its forms, I
have made much progress toward speaking up even if I am feeling
intimidated. God has shown me another Bible verse that I have memorized
and use quite often to encourage others and remind myself of God's
truth.
These
are the words of Paul who wrote to the Ephesian Christians with this
request: Ephesians 6:19-20 Pray also for me, that whenever I open my
mouth, words may be given me so that I may fearlessly make known the
mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that
I may declare it fearlessly as I should.
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